The writer
Suicide is a really heavy, deep and troubling topic, but today, I want to delve into it and share my own lived experience that I have never publicly shared before.
I believe this article is timely also because just recently a South African footballer who played in the World Cup took his own life when he returned home to SA; and a Ghanaian man, admired and loved by many, also allegedly recently took his life.
Suicide is a topic we shy away from but it is a subject that deserves to be addressed and understood fully.
Here are some statistics: More than 720,000 people die by suicide every year worldwide.
That means approximately: 1,970 deaths every day; 82 deaths every hour. One death approximately every 43 seconds. Suicide accounts for more than 1 in every 100 deaths globally. Around 73% of suicides occur in low- and middle-income countries.
For every person who dies by suicide, more than 20 other adults are estimated to attempt suicide.
One statistic that surprises many people: Suicide is the third leading cause of death worldwide among people aged 15–29 years. This is one reason suicide prevention has become such a major global public health priority.
When I was at the University of Ghana, I attempted suicide, an actual attempt. I had an interaction with someone I considered the absolute love of my life. We were in a relationship for a period of time, broke up, and then had this weird on and off thing happening, but I was deeply in love with him.
He was everything to me. He came by my hostel one night and called me to come downstairs. I didn’t know if he was there to see me or other friends, but I went down all the same. We leaned against his car and kissed for a bit. A few moments later, we were interrupted by someone who called his name loudly. He pulled back quickly and his hand “shoved” me back just a little bit. It wasn’t a hard shove, but it was a gesture to indicate distance. I was stunned.
The person who called his name came over to us. They hugged and started talking animatedly. I stood there for a bit, awkwardly, and then said to him that I needed to get back to my room. He simply said okay. My heart dropped. I felt so hurt, broken, discarded and embarrassed. I walked away silently and stoically. I went up the stairs quietly, no tears, nothing.
Then I went to my room, went out to the balcony which overlooked the car park and stared at him talking to a group of friends. I was staying at the International Students Hostel, and my room at this time directly overlooked the car park. After staring at him for a little bit, I pulled a knife from the drying rack.
There was no cooking allowed in the rooms, so my roommate and I had a mini kitchen on the balcony. I dropped down onto the floor of the balcony, took a deep breath and used the knife to slice my wrist with as much force as I could muster.
It cut, but it wasn’t deep. Only a trickle of blood came out. My roommate and I’s knives had been blunt for weeks and we had talked about getting them sharpened but we never did because they managed to slice through soft tomatoes and bread and we didn’t even cook much. That was when I started crying, when I realized I had failed at even ending my life. I stared at the little trickle of blood and bawled my eyes out.
My roommate showed up sometime later when I was still on the balcony, on the floor, with the knife, sobbing. She sat down beside me and held me, told me she saw my ex earlier and was coming to find me, to check up on me. In between sobs, I told her what happened. She did what most friends would do, eviscerated him completely, all the while removing the knife from my hand and cleaning up the little trickle of blood.
To this day, sometimes I glance at my wrist, and I can see the little line, my reminder of a pain that took me to a brink I didn’t expect to reach. I loved this person hopelessly and his hand on my chest, the little shove, it felt like he had reached into my heart and crushed it. At that age, in my early twenties, I didn’t know I had borderline personality disorder (BPD), but learning about the condition now, I know that is what I was going through, a deep, unbearable emotional pain and self-harm often associated with the disorder.
Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is associated with a genuinely elevated risk of suicidal thoughts, attempts and death. A 2025 meta-analysis involving 35 studies and more than 34,000 people with BPD estimated lifetime rates of approximately 80% for suicidal thoughts, 52% for suicide attempts and 6% for death by suicide. Earlier literature often quoted a figure of up to 10% for suicide mortality.
Basically, 80% of BPD sufferers will consider suicide, 52% will attempt it and 6-10% will succeed.
The connection between BPD and suicide is not simply that people with BPD are “impulsive.”
Several features can converge during a crisis: emotions may become extraordinarily intense very quickly; rejection, abandonment, conflict or perceived humiliation may produce overwhelming psychological pain; thinking may temporarily become rigid; e.g., this will never end; nothing can repair this; impulsivity can shorten the interval between suicidal thoughts and action; identity disturbance, emptiness, shame and self-hatred may intensify the wish to escape; dissociation can reduce a person’s sense of connection to themselves, their body or the consequences of an action.
All of that was me at that moment when I attempted. I was hurting badly. I was in a lot of pain. I felt rejected. It was a crisis, and I desperately wanted to shut it all down. It wasn’t just about him, to be honest. I felt completely worthless, that nobody I wanted me, truly wanted me. I was in my early twenties, and I was overwhelmed by crippling emotions. My roommate and I never discussed the incident again and I never told anyone, except my therapist and psychiatrist decades later, and now you, my readers.
Prior to that incident at the University of Ghana, I had made at least two attempts to run away from home. That was how bad I was managing my emotions. Sometimes you watch western movies that involve kids and teens acting out and running away and wonder how or why they do that. I’ve done that before, so I know how and why. There is this burning need in your soul to stop the pain. Once, I walked from Airport Residential Area (where Best Western Hotel, Airport, currently is) to the University of Ghana, due to a conflict at home, and attempted to find my cousins who lived on campus. I ran from the house and walked the entire way to Legon. I got to the main entrance of the University before I was found and scooped up. I either walked barefoot or my slippers were terribly worn because my feet were scarred and I couldn’t walk for a couple of days. It wasn’t my last attempt at running away.
Running away, self injury and suicide are all usually attempts to regulate unbearable emotion, interrupt dissociation, punish oneself or communicate distress that feels impossible to express verbally. These are not attention seeking or manipulative actions.
A couple of years ago, I came across a screenshot that summarized suicide really succinctly for me and I have used this analogy in several posts since. Someone is on fire and is in pain, unbearable, excruciating pain, and they feel trapped in this burning building, with no way out of the fire, except to jump through a window, which presents certain death.
There is no logical thinking happening, all the person knows is that they are on fire and they need it to STOP. The challenge for most observers is that we cannot see the fire that the sufferer is going through. We just see that they are home and fine and managing, but we cannot see the unimaginable pain racking their minds and bodies. So we judge only based on what we can perceive, and that is usually nowhere close to the real picture.
By Boakyewaa Glover
